Posts Tagged ‘peace’

There were lots of revolutions lately and in the few past years. There was the arab spring, the protests in Turkey, now there are some angry Ukrainians etc. … Well, also there were some Bulgarians on the streets since June (more than 8 months already). While the protests in Turkey and Ukraine are presented in the media very detailed and receive quite the support from foreign media, the protests in Bulgaria were not that present in the media. The important foreign media only reported about the protests in Bulgaria when there were escalating and there were injured demonstrators. As this was not that often, the media didn’t reported that much about this protests. After all – there were lots of other demonstrations and protests with much more injured demonstrators.

Isn’t it only fair to report more about the protests where more people get injured? Kind of yes… but doesn’t that tell people, that only a bloody news are news? At least that’s the message I get from the media and that’s kind of the wrong message, isn’t it? Why do we learn to solve problems without violence as children, when later on violence is all that counts? Isn’t “Eight months of peaceful protests in Bulgaria” a good headline? Not really, it’s just not that emotional as “100 injured in protests in …”

It is only logical that we react very emotional to violence, but that is simply because they shouldn’t occur on a daily basis, it’s something very extraordinary that normally shouldn’t occur that often. So the right message would be to show off peaceful protests as a good example, to report about them, simply to show that it is an option. I believe that it is the more mature option, it is the option that really stands for change as it doesn’t do things like the government but in the way we teach out children – don’t treat others like you don’t want they to treat you. But also the more difficult option, because you need lot’s of endurance to achieve your goal. So dear demonstrators in Bulgaria – I wish you all the endurance you need to achieve your goals!

PS. as Justine from Smiling shortly wrote, at least the european government is showing some interest in the protests and is trying to understand what’s going on, which is really difficult as there is no real freedom of speach in the Bulgarian media…
The godless paladin also wrote an interesting article related tot hat topic – check it out 🙂

Since I am driving to work now instead of riding the bus for hour and a half, I’ll be sharing some episodes on the road and on the bus with you in the near future. So here is one from today:

I was waiting on a red traffic light on one cross-way today. One other car was coming behind me, as the traffic lights turns green.

peace sign

Instead of waiting for me to start rolling, this other car just went in the opposite direction lane without blinking, so that it wouldn’t have to slow down and slid in front of me. That was pretty annoying and I wanted to give him the bird. Since I stated driving there were a bunch of situations like this, where I wanted to let other drivers know, that they aren’t driving correctly. But I was always to busy with driving as it is, so that I never managed to give someone the finger or flash him the lights, because I just didn’t have enough attentional resources to do it. But today I was just waiting for a traffic light, as he slipped in front of me, so my attention was not that concentrated on the road. So this was my moment, finally I could give someone the finger for behaving badly on the road!!!

And so I did, only to notice, that instead of giving him the finger, my hand was showing the peace sing. Because of the way I am holding the wheel, my other finger was also standing up. So this asshole was getting the peace sing from me. And in that moment it hit me. This was kind of even beer then giving him the finger. Driving is so aggressive anyway. You deal with aggression the whole time and you have to be a bit aggressive too in order to keep up. A peace sing was much more what this and all other aggressive drivers needed.

So if you really want to show it to someone, show him a peace sing for a change 🙂

Recently Helen told me that it’s better to forgive and forget than hate. I agree with her, but she got me thinking. How does it works?

I think, that we need to forgive first, so that we can forget after that. You can not forget something you haven’t forgiven, at least I can’t. May be some people forgive when they forget something, may be that’s how the “time heals everything” works. But I think that it’s not really forgotten, it’s just faded away then.